On 8/25/07, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for giving the link. It demonstrates that Avalos doesn't
> understand Christian ethics or Christian history -- or for that matter,
> ethics and history in general.
>
> For example, Avalos says this:
>
>
> *Christianity is actually founded on moral relativism that is even more
> chaotic than secular systems of ethics. Ephesians 2:15 tells us this about
> what Christ did to the Law of Moses: "by abolishing in his flesh the law of
> commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in
> place of the two, so making peace." In fact, from a traditional Jewish
> viewpoint, Christianity is founded on systematically destroying God's laws
> as revealed to Moses, and so speaking of a Judeo-Christian tradition is also
> akin to speaking of a Capitalist-Marxist tradition. *
>
>
> If Avalos weren't so serious about this, it would almost be amusing that
> he engages in the same sort of willy-nilly proof-texting as religious
> fundamentalists. There are many ways to understand the relationship between
> the Gospel and the Law, but no responsible Christian interpreter is as
> antinomian as Avalos is here. At the very least, Avalos seems to be
> ignorant of the many rich streams of Christian thought that wrestle with the
> Gospel-Law relationship in ways that are not in any sense relativistic or
> antinomian. I wonder, for example, if Avalos has read Frank Thielman's
> recent study "Paul and the Law" ( http://tinyurl.com/2jgm7k). Indeed, I
> wonder if Avalos is aware of the depth of the entire Christian tradition on
> the Gospel-Law relationship. Somehow, I doubt it.
>

Your doubt at most shows the weakness of your argument not that of Avalos's.
I find it fascinating how people tend to respond to criticism by resorting
to the adhominems such as 'no responsible Christian interpreter'.

This is only one of the many clunkers and recycled chestnuts in Avalos'
> article. As another example, he picks on R.A. Torrey -- who is not even a
> contemporary creationist of the sort Avalos supposedly is doing battle --
> for the following statement:
>

Why should the creationist be contemporary when Avalos's argument is that
this kind of thought predates Darwinism?

*Even today I could almost wish that all the babies born into families of
> wicked influence might be slain in infancy, were it not for the hope that
> some concerned Christian will carry to them the saving gospel of the Son of
> God. *
>
> In context, Torrey is trying to understand the OT's "holy war" passages,
> and is suggesting that perhaps in some sense it was better for some of the
> Canaanite infants to die young rather than to be raised in a context in
> which they would surely have worshipped Baal. We can reasonably debate
> whether Torrey's approach to these passages is a good one, but notice that,
> contrary to Avalos' argument, Torrey is not in any way advocating abortion,
> infanticide, or genocide. Even the out-of-context- quote Avalos provides
> makes clear that Torrey is *not* advocating infanticide, but rather is
> expressing the hope that concerned Christians will share the gospel with
> everyone.
>

Aha, surely your accusation of out of context quote fails since it is, as
you state, not out of context. Furthermore, a more careful reading of what
Avalos wrote shows that he refers to Torrey as a 'defender' of the kind of
genocide found in these examples.

> Moreover, none of this has anything at all to do with Torrey's views about
> creation. What Avalos is really arguing here is that any view that
> incorporates the perspective of an afterlife is morally abominable. This,
> again, is an
>

You seem to be missing Avalos's argument then. Love those strawmen...

old atheist chestnut -- the promise and/or threat of an afterlife makes
> people less attentive to things in this life, less sensitive to suffering,
> etc. And again, it's a fundamentalist-style argument that relies on
> extremes. True, some people who believe in an afterlife use that belief to
> justify or support evil actions. But, as an empirical matter, it simply
> isn't true that all, most, or even an appreciable percentage of the
> afterlife-believing population do anything of the sort. Indeed, the
> evidence might suggest that belief in an afterlife can encourage people to
> act *more* compassionately in this life. And of course, many, many
> atrocities have been perpetrated by people who believed their actions in
> this life carry no repurcussions for them beyond the grave.
>

And yet we see how Avalos is documenting a Christian thought process which
if not condones, surely understands the concept of genocide and how these
thoughts precede Darwinian theory.

As one last example of Avalos' embarassingly shallow treatment, take a look
> at the summary tables at the end of his article. Avalos compares Nazi
> ideology and the Bible as follows:
>
>
> Nazi Ideology Anti-Judaism YES YES Homosexuality condemned YES YES Genealogical
> purity demanded YES YES Life unequal in value YES YES Whole groups
> devalued YES YES Genocide permissible YES YES
>
>
> He claims this table applies not only to the holy war passages in the OT,
> but to the whole Bible, including the NT. Of course, he makes no effort at
> all to understand how Jews and Christians actually read and understand
> scripture. His is a kind of cherry-picking literalism that not even the
> most fundamentalist of Christian exegetes would employ. With regard to the
> Christian understanding of the Bilbe, he completely ignores the primacy of
> the Cross, and he seems blind to the socially leveling influence that
> Christianity has actually had in history.
>

So he ignores thing although he is right to point out these similarities?
Surely analogies do end at a certain level, but this is in response to the
somewhat irresponsible arguments by Weikart. All Avalos is doing is showing
how genocide and Christian and Judean thought on these matters precedes
Darwinism.

With regard to the Jewish understanding of the Bible, one can only
> describe Avalos' tables as alternating between incoherent and anti-semitic.
> Let's be clear about what Avalos is saying concerning the Jewish scriptures
> and, by implication, the Jewish tradition that is based on those
> scriptures: he is arguing that Judaism is equivalent to Nazism! Let that
> really sink in if you are at all tempted to think Avalos' approach here is
> reasonable.
>

Love them strawmen. Accuse Avalos of anti-semitism, surely that's going to
make his arguments go away. Never mind whether or not there is some level
of veracity to Avalos's arguments... It's much simpler to make it go away by
distracting from his arguments.

Avalos' concluding paragraph is a fitting summary for this mess of an
> essay. He says:
>
>
> Creationist ethics are based on the whims and claims of people who tell us
> they know what God wants. Scientific ethics, as imperfect as they may be, at
> least can demand verifiable evidence that violence in self-defense is
> necessary. Theistic violence, on the other hand, often relies on the
> unverifiable belief that a supernatural being said we had to sacrifice human
> life.
>
>
> It's hard to know where to begin with a passage like this. Avalos seems
> to equate "creationist ethics" with some radical form of divine command
> theory tied to an even more radical interpretive framework that would allow
> for random prophetic utterances without any normative framework. Once
> again, Avalos displays his ignorance of the variations of religious ethics,
> which often incorporate at least some limited type of natural theology in
> addition to the divine command. Avalos further ignores the idea that the
> divine command itself, in the Christian tradition, is not given at the whims
> of some people at any point in history, but is normed by the commands and
> actions of Christ -- in particular by the Cross -- and by the canonical
> scriptures.
>
> Avalos' notion of "scientific ethics" in this concluding paragraph is
> equally baffling. There is no serious, sustained school of thought
> concerning "scientific ethics." There are some interesting, recent
> proposals concerning how evolution might have conditioned ethical thinking,
> but no ethicists, religious or secular, outside of perhaps a very small
> minority of die-hard reductionistic materialists, conceive of ethics as a
> science of the same sort as, say, physics or microbiology.
>

Another nice non sequitur. Whether or not the science of ethics is of the
same level as say physics, is irrelevant. There is quite an extensive
scientific literature on the concept of ethics, ignoring this is just
irresponsible.

In fact, if Avalos' notion of "scientific ethics" is correct, then not only
> religious ethics, but *every* system of ethics employed by *all* people
> throughout *all *of human history must be scrapped. Not just divine
> command theory and natural law ethics, but also eudaimonistic virtue ethics,
> consequentialism, and social contract theory must go by the boards, because
> *all* of them involve normative judgments that are not reducible to
> falsificationist "science."
>

I love these strawmen...

And that, at the end of the day, is Avalos' real argument -- an argument in
> favor of a reductionistic materialism and against anything that stands in
> its way.
>

Yes, let's redefine his argument in the same manner Avalos shows how
creationists get to redefine the interpretation of 'ethics' and avoid having
to deal with Avalos's arguments.

Nothing to say about Luther's statement? I wonder why?

Avalos's argument is about the flaws in Weikart's arguments but somehow
David seems to know better. Fascinating...